


four days and three nights

by lettersfromnowhere



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: A LOT of Angst, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:13:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25793437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettersfromnowhere/pseuds/lettersfromnowhere
Summary: Zuko discovers firsthand that nothing is more fleeting than happiness, or more enduring than memory.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 68
Kudos: 219





	four days and three nights

**Author's Note:**

> GUYS, I'M SO SORRY.
> 
> Now with a podfic from the absolutely lovely @RideBoldlyRide:
> 
> [RideBoldlyRide](https://soundcloud.com/ride-boldly) · [4 Days; 3 Nights.](https://soundcloud.com/ride-boldly/4-days-3-nights)

Zuko had never quite felt like his life began the day he was born.

  
If he wanted to pinpoint the day he truly left his mark on the world and the day the world left its mark on him, he’d have options, and he frequently weighed them: the day he was banished and the day he turned from his family to join the Avatar and the day of his final Agni Kai and the day was crowned Fire Lord. Perhaps they were _all_ the day his life began, in their own way.

But privately, he already knew, beyond a question, that the day his life began was the day that his ambassador lingered a little too long outside her bedroom door after he’d walked her back for the night and, barely looking at him, rose on tiptoes and pulled him down by the collar of his sparring tunic to kiss him. She was still sweaty and short of breath with matted hair and a tiny, shy smile that made it all too easy for Zuko to pull her right back into his orbit where she belonged. All the words he’d been too shy to say came tumbling out in that meeting of lips and a few moments later he murmured them into the crook of her neck, too overcome to stop himself.

They were nineteen and twenty-one, that night. He never looked back.

* * *

Contrary to what everyone seemed to have predicted, the Fire Nation rejoiced when the Fire Lord’s engagement to Ambassador Katara of the Southern Water Tribe was announced. It was peace personified, this match, and the people had come to love the ambassador and her kindness and compassion and the way she was unafraid to get her hands dirty and fight tirelessly on their behalf. She’d pushed for reform and healed countless sick and injured and the people, if not Zuko’s officials, could not have asked for a Fire Lady who would love or advocate for them more.

So where there was to be uproar, there was celebration, and none greater than that between Zuko and Katara themselves. For they were deeply, deliriously in love, everyone knew that; they were perfectly matched, endlessly enamored of each other, drawn together as in orbit. Years of deep friendship and bitten-back confessions of feelings it had taken most of those years to sort out had built a foundation that both were determined to let nothing break. They were a united front in politics and in personal matters; they whispered promises of forever between stolen kisses; they planned a wedding and a future. She was his Polaris, he her anchor, and they were too lost in each other to worry that they’d be blown off-course. They knew they would have time for worry later – a lifetime of it and no end of things to fret over, politics and the economy and the children whose names they had already chosen – but now was the time to bask in each other’s light and nothing suited them better than that.

Their engagement lasted six months, and they were the happiest six months of Zuko’s life.

* * *

It was in the fifth month of their engagement that the first cases began to appear.

At first, no one thought to bring the reports of the strange illness cropping up around the city’s walls to the attention of the Fire Lord, already so preoccupied in restoring international relations and planning his wedding (and incredibly distracted from all of this by the surpassing loveliness of his bride-to-be). But Katara soon learned of the outbreak on a routine hospital visit and it could remain a secret no longer.

She was furious, locking herself in a study with the Minister of Health Services and shouting and railing at the man until the guards posted at the door swore their ears bled. Accusations of incompetence were volleyed alongside questions of loyalty and the man came out of it more than a little bit worse for the wear, but Katara had her information, and the next day she set out for the shantytown near the city walls where the outbreak had originated armed with determination and a waterskin, searching for answers.

Their explanation of the illness that had struck so many of the residents of their densely-packed settlement was fanciful, something they called Lady Ting’s Revenge. Legend had it that the titular Earth Kingdom woman, a witch taken prisoner by the Fire nation ninety years ago, had cursed the invading force with convulsions and nausea and fever and chills until they withered away as a parting gift and every last man had succumbed.

And now Lady Ting’s Revenge had come to Caldera City.

An investigation showed Katara that the outbreak was the result of a contaminated well, not a vengeful Earth National’s last stand, but it was too late for many in the slum. And Katara realized with dread that the outbreak wouldn’t end with this village, though she’d bent the toxins from its water. If she wished to stop this outbreak, she would have to find every well that was contaminated this way and clean them all of toxins. It would be near-impossible to truly put an end to the spread of the disease, but Katara did not feel as if she had the choice of sitting by.

They were twenty-one and twenty-three, and she located and purified the last of the wells the afternoon before they were to be married.

* * *

Zuko and Katara’s wedding was full of all the pomp they wished they could’ve avoided but could not. There were guests from every nation, most of whom the couple could absolutely not care less about, and ornate décor that no one but gossipy old noblewomen could possibly care about, and ceremony and somberness that was utterly at odds with the sheer joy they both feel when a kiss sealed their union. They spent the reception with their friends, clinging to each other and beaming like sunshine and ignoring the fact that propriety demanded that they attend to their other guests, too, and they made a stuffy night lively and joyous and _perfect._

It was hours and hours until either was able to sleep that night, but when they did, they drifted off entangled in each other’s arms, so close and so intertwined that it was shocking when they awoke to discover that they’d managed to shift in the night. They took stock of their position, limbs tangled up like the tentacles of a clumsy pentapus, and laughed and laughed and _laughed_ before Katara’s mirthful smile softened and she pressed her palm to the scar on Zuko’s chest.

  
He kissed her soundly, then, and decided it was the happiest moment of his life.

(It seemed so premature in the moment to assign such grand importance to such a small moment but perhaps that was his heart’s way of prognosticating what would befall him.

Perhaps he knew all along that it would never be topped.)

* * *

They spent their honeymoon on Ember Island. It seemed only fitting, returning to the place it all began to celebrate their marriage, and the beautiful climate and scenery (of which both privately deemed the other the most beautiful part) and the knowledge that there was no need to do _anything at all_ made both almost giddy with excitement.

  
The first night they laid out on the sand, watching the stars as warm seawater lapped gently at their feet, unaware of how those stars had crossed them.

The second night they stumbled home from the Ember Island Players’ rendition of their courtship (they had no idea that the couple would be visitng, to the endless amusement of both of them) laughing hysterically, and Zuko blamed the burning heat in Katara’s cheeks on the exertion of sustained laughter and the nighttime heat and the way she was looking at him.

The third night Katara was exhausted for no reason at all, but Zuko was far from bothered. He took hours to fall asleep after she did, but watching the shallow rise and fall of her back as she clung to his waist, face pressed against his chest in a position that could not _possibly_ have been comfortable, was enough for him.

  
The fourth morning, she woke before he did, and when she returned from the bathroom her face was pale and full of dread. It was all to obvious what had happened, and for a moment Zuko’s heart soared, thinking the best, until he realized that it simply wasn’t possible. A week since the wedding wouldn’t be long enough for an heir to be making its presence known so clearly.

No, this had to be bad.

Katara didn’t want to worry him – Zuko could tell by the way she forced smiles when he asked her what had happened and what she wanted to do – but he fretted over her anyway. Try as she might to wave him off and insist she was fine, Zuko didn’t believe a word of it.

On the fourth night, Katara pasted on a smile and said she needed a snack. Moments later Zuko heard a _thud_ in the kitchen and came running to find her sprawled on the floor with the bowl of sea prunes she’d been carrying spilled across the tile.

* * *

Fight as she tried to, Katara did not take long to decline after they returned from Ember Island. Whispers blamed the wells she’d purified, the people she’d insisted upon healing; Katara insisted just as fiercely that the victims of what they were still calling Lady Ting’s Revenge were not to blame for her illness. “Anyone could’ve gotten it!” she’d said, eyes flashing, when she still had the strength to raise her voice. “I had to do what I had to do. It was my duty as Fire Lady!”

Never mind that she hadn’t been Fire Lady yet when it happened, though she was by the time she’d started to fade. It was a role she refused to let anyone forget she still held and the moon crown her husband had commissioned for her upon their engagement still sat atop her head, even though it was heavy and her strength failing. Katara had insisted upon that in spite of her husband’s tearful pleas to save her strength. _(This isn’t about my strength, Zuko, it’s about remembering who I am,_ she’d said, taking his face in her hands and tilting it to look up at her. It was the same reason she still wore her mother’s necklace, the reason her clothes now were all blue, the reason she’d summoned their friends when she knew she’d fallen ill.)

_I’m yours now, and I won’t let anyone forget it._ Those had been her words and Zuko’s mind would never let him forget them.

Looking back on their lives, he realized that, here or gone, she always would be.

* * *

“You’re going to make it.”

“Zuko…” Katara’s shoulders slumped weakly as he gently pulled a comb through her hair. “Don’t.”

  
“But you _have_ to, Katara!” he stopped combing, angling himself so he could take her hands and look her in the eye. “It doesn’t even make _sense._ You’re a _healer,_ and you’re young and healthy and you can _fight_ this-“

“It isn’t that simple, love,” she said, pushing herself up with trembling arms until she could reach him. He slipped a hand behind her back, supporting her so she could stay upright when days of dehydration and nausea and fever had weakened her. And though the touch of her hands was weak now, he felt the weight of the world in the brush of her fingers against his scar as she leaned in to kiss him.

Even weak, even diminished, even barely-there, her kiss felt like a homecoming.

“It _should_ be,” he murmured when he pulled back, urging himself to be gentle when all he wanted was _more_ to remember her by.

“But it’s not.”

Zuko always said she’d known before he did.

* * *

Katara went in delirious fever, shouting his name. And he was there, his hand covering hers until it went limp and his world shattered. 

* * *

It felt as if all of Caldera City wore white the day the news of the Fire Lady’s passing reached their ears. She was their heroine, became even moreso in death; they held her up as a martyr and Zuko closed his ears to their praises of the love of his life.

He couldn’t _take_ it, knowing she’d gone because she had made a choice, knowing it had been oh so _preventable,_ knowing he was selfish enough to wish she’d have chosen a life with him over the thousands of lives she’d saved in the outbreak.

He felt phantom arms around him sometimes, a nonexistent warmth beside him at night, and when looked out at the world it was always through a dismal, unabating cloak of grey.

He dressed in white for two years and he replayed every minute of the week of marriage they’d been given before she fell ill in his mind before sleeping.

* * *

Zuko wanted to be a hopeless romantic. He wanted to say that Katara was the only love he’d ever know (which he knew was true), swear off the very notion of marrying again and refuse to so much as look at a woman again. And any other man might’ve had that choice, but Zuko had a nation to think of. Another man could live an entire lifetime on nothing but memories and a week’s worth of perfection. Zuko could not.

So when it had been four years and the Council threatens to put his sister on the throne should he refuse to remarry, he took a Fire Lady and treated her with the attention and gentleness she deserved and tried to pretend that it was not Katara’s face he saw when he kissed her.

Fire Lady Lian was beautiful and delicate and compassionate and gentle, and Zuko liked her, he truly did. She was pleasant and dutiful and he thought she might be in love with him, which caused him no end of guilt. The way she looked at him like an eighth wonder of the world and her shy, encouraging smiles bore a hole in his conscience, though she never seemed to expect him to feel the same way; after all, everyone knew about the tragedy of his first marriage, that he was one-half of a love story cut short.

She was undemanding and lovely and he _wanted_ to love her. Perhaps he did, as a friend and a companion.

But she didn’t set him afire the way Katara had, and Zuko accepted this as his lot in life.

(He’d always known it, a simple fact he could neither change nor deny: Katara was his first love, and Katara would be his last.)

* * *

It took a pair of baby blues to cut through the fog surrounding Zuko’s mind.

Of course, Izumi’s eyes turned golden later on, but when she was born they were a brilliant blue that brought tears to Zuko’s eyes the first time he saw them because she felt like a gift from the love he’d lost. And she _was_ such a gift – Izumi and her two little brothers, later on, were the brightest color in a life he’d long ago accepted would always be grey.

He loved his children fiercely, the way he wished he could love Lian but couldn’t bring himself to, and he rested ever-so-slightly easier knowing that the nation’s future was secure.

(Never mind the frenzy it sent him into when one of them so much as sneezed, or the way he fought with Izumi when she reached adolescence and insisted on knowing _why_ he kept her so cosseted and sequestered from the world when _a good Fire Lord has to know her subjects, why can’t you see that?_

They were his joy and they were another thing to lose.)

* * *

Izumi was twenty-seven and madly in love when Zuko and Lian stepped down to let her take their place on the throne and it raised a lump in Zuko’s throat, watching his firstborn dance with the upstart Earth National envoy who’d captured her heart at a diplomatic summit five years ago. He prayed they’d be happy, safe, all the things he hadn’t been.

And they were, in time. There were two heirs to the throne within a decade and the wonder with which the couple regarded each other faded only a little. (Most of all, Zuko hoped it _never_ would – he’d never had the chance to find out whether the shimmer of a love like that could survive time and distance and age and arguments, and he desperately hoped, for his own sake as much as for Izumi’s, that it could.) Soon Izumi’s brothers followed suit and the Ember Island house was filled with the sounds of children’s laughter long into the night each summer.

That house would always hold a bitter place in Zuko’s heart, but he began to realize midway through the fourth summer that Katara wouldn’t have wanted it to. _Remember the good,_ he could almost hear her telling him. _Don’t you dare let me ruin a good thing for you._

The Katara in his mind was still so young, still as she was when he lost her, and he felt his age all the more when confronted with the memories of younger days here. He wondered if he’d see her again, and if she’d have grown old as he did or if she’d be forever preserved by death and memory with the youthful glow of twenty-one.

He wondered what he’d say to her if he did see her again.

He wondered what she’d think of Lian, if she’d be glad he’d secured the throne or upset that he’d led a woman who so obviously loved him in a marriage that was so obviously one-sided.

He wondered if she’d know that he’d wanted Izumi’s name to be Kya, simply because he knew it was what Katara would’ve named a firstborn daughter.

He wondered if the happiness of the past years had been real or simply what he allowed himself to be content with, knowing that true happiness was something he’d only ever found in her.

(Four days and three nights - that was all he’d gotten.)

* * *

In the end, he was right. She was as radiantly twenty-one as Zuko had ever imagined when he saw her next and he marveled at the feeling of those arms around him for the first time in seventy-eight years.

  
(He didn’t ever think he’d be able to cry in the Spirit World. He was wrong.)

“I’ve waited for you,” she said, deft fingers brushing tears from his face as she cupped his cheeks, getting a good look at him (Zuko rather vainly hoped he appeared as young as she did). “You did good, Zuko.”

He’d waited seventy-eight years and would wait no longer to press his lips to hers. And seventy-eight years later, they still felt like homecoming.


End file.
